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Gazetteer providing information about more than 23,500 towns in Central and Eastern Europe where Jews lived before the Holocaust.

"The story of World War II, told in diary-style. All major battles, advances, retreats, triumphs and disasters, in all theatres of war, are chronicled in daily sequence, making the progress of the war easy to follow. It highlights the confusion behind even the best-planned military strategies."

A compilation of five essays, four of them published previously in slightly different form. Overall, the book discusses Jewish identity in Hungary in the 19th-20th centuries, reflecting on Jews caught between the two poles of assimilation and rejection. Liberals granted rights to the Jews but demanded their adoption of a Hungarian identity, while antisemites saw them as unassimilable and wanted the Jews to leave the country. In the 19th century Jews were often stereotyped as "homo oeconomicus", which had positive connotations for the liberals but highly negative ones for the anti-bourgeois right-wing populists. Antisemitism had political repercussions only after World War I. The Holocaust did not provide a new Jewish identity to replace the fragmented religious one. Identifying Jews by origin has often been a tool of antisemitic propaganda; the same approach also obfuscates complex cases of the identity of many people who were born as Jews, in Hungary, e.g. Miklós Radnóti, Béla Kuhn, and several churchmen. Following are the essays, all of which deal (some more and some less) with the development of antisemitism in Hungary in the 19th-20th centuries (but not with the Holocaust period):

The destruction of nearly six million Jews during the Second World War is not only the unique tragedy of the Jewish people, but also a part of the history of the War. In this book, 25 of the leading specialists in Europe, America and Israel describe various aspects of the interrelation between the conduct of the war and the destruction of the Jews. These studies include analyses of the German army and administration, the policy of the fascist parties, the German satellite states, questions relating to rescuing Jews, and the Jewish Resistance.

Pp. 1-11 contain a list of 55 bibliographies on the Holocaust, in English, the European languages, Hebrew, and Yiddish. The rest of the book is a directory of institutions throughout the world involved in Holocaust studies.

Each map comes with detailed textual background information. The Atlas can be regarded as a condensed history of the Holocaust, presenting the geographical aspects of the historic events. -- Introduction.